those who have a superior talent for communicating their thoughts in an agreeable and effective way (agréablement et utilement).15
In Poullain’s variation on Descartes’s psychophysiology, what he called the distinctive “constitution” of the female brain was not a matter of softer fibers. Recent discoveries in anatomy, he argued in another passage, proved that male and female brains were “exactly the same.” The gendered difference lay in the fact that women’s sense organs were “more delicate,” and hence that the images imprinted on their brains by their imaginations were stronger. Poullain’s radical step lay in assuming that this “more lively” image-making capacity, rather than constricting or overwhelming women’s capacity for abstract thought, gave them the intellectual “advantage.” Taking up what was sometimes implied in the discourse of honnêteté, he made psychophysiological “delicacy”—the putative source of women’s intellectual weakness—the source of their cognitive strength. A woman’s more delicate sensations and stronger imagistic faculty did not make her mind less capable of rational intellection; they gave her thought more clarity, and in that sense more vigor. At the same time Poullain derived from women’s physical delicacy and powers of imagination a natural “eloquence” and persuasiveness. It was not simply that their speech, like their thought, was clear. They had a natural gift for communicating their thoughts in “beautiful” forms: “their message is accompanied by such beauty and grace that it penetrates our minds and opens our heart to them.” Female speech was the instrument of a superior social intelligence; one might even say that it was the social act intrinsic to the workings of that intelligence.
In Poullain’s normative revaluation of female powers of cognition and communication, the implications of two meanings of the “natural”—the “natural” reason of Cartesian philosophy and the “natural” quality of the honnête femme—reinforced each other. Because women had not been corrupted by the formal education of “the schools,” their minds naturally gave assent to self-evident truths to which the learned were blinded. And for the same reason, women’s powers of intelligence were plain to see in the natural flow of their speech. Poullain’s revaluation of female delicacy did not, it should be stressed, give a new lease on life to the conventional paradox that the strength of women lay in their weakness, which required them to develop the wily arts of manipulation and dissimulation summed up in the word “cunning.” His claim was that, thanks to the greater delicacy of their sense organs, women tended to have greater clarity of mind in precisely those areas of intellectual labor which, on the traditional assumption, only men could perform. Nor did his appreciation of female eloquence have the effect of reconsigning women to a merely ornamental role, a world of pleasing appearance distinct from the male world of intellectual substance. By aestheticizing communication, women could give the rational thought of the sciences and their professional applications a new social purchase. The truly learned woman, like the honnête femme, would “insinuate” her thoughts in the positive sense. Rather than being imposed by sheer force of logic, or by overpowering rhetorical techniques, knowledge would be extended as a gift of beauty from one embodied mind to another. Above all in that sense women’s intelligence—unlike the intelligence of the trained rhetor or the pedant—was naturally social.
This reading of Equality is confirmed by the actual agenda for social change that Poullain spelled out in his war against “custom” and “prejudice.” The emancipation of women, to be sure, was only a means to a larger end, a step in realizing a rational distribution of life chances in the entire social organization of labor. There would be an end to the inheritance and sale of offices requiring education; for men as for women, a “wise selection process” would place every individual in the position for which his aptitudes best suited him. It is hardly surprising, however, that women figured especially large in this vision of careers open to talent; the belief that they were self-evidently unqualified for such positions was the most imposing obstacle to it. In the face of conventional wisdom, Cartesian logic did not suffice. Poullain had to harness to it the gendered inversion of the attributes of intelligence in the discourse of honnêteté. And that entailed doing something quite remarkable in the context of late seventeenth-century France—something that would have been virtually unthinkable to interpreters of honnêteté like Méré, Scudéry, and Saint-Évremond. The natural attributes of thought and speech that Poullain extolled were precisely the ones that had made women the guardians of an exclusive, self-referential code, marked above all by freedom from the constraints and indeed the appearance of labor. But now those attributes became women’s qualifications for entering a world of labor that had been closed to them. Intellectual labor was no longer a social stigma, an activity threatening social derogation; it was the social arena in which emancipated women would prove themselves.
It is important to realize how far Poullain went in pulling the social aesthetic of honnêteté down from its elite perch of privileged leisure. Properly educated women, he argued, would be equal or superior to men in all areas of educated labor. He discussed many cases in point, including university teaching, scientific research, medicine, law, theology and clerical offices, military command, and government service. Women, he observed, were less likely to be attracted to fields like algebra, geometry, and optics, but that was not because they lacked the intellectual capacity to excel in them. The nature of their intelligence simply inclined them more to learning that drew them into social interaction, or what he called “the mainstream of conversation.”
All this is to say that the utopian impulse in Equality took two forms. Inspired by Descartes’s radical questioning of the very principle of “authority,” Poullain wanted the dead weight of history to accede to the active force of reason. He rejected what he saw as an irrationally organized society, built on the arbitrary and hence unjust historical contingencies that lurked behind appeals to the sanctity of tradition. In a just social structure, education and its rewards would be open to talent and achievement; the ascriptive power of both gender and class would be annulled. Providing women equal access to educated labor would be the first step in a sweeping reorganization of the distribution of life chances—the step that would prove that the entire agenda could prevail over ingrained resistance to it. But in Equality female emancipation did not figure simply as the first step in a structural change; it was also the key element—the sine qua non—in Poullain’s vision of a cultural transformation, a transvaluation of the values, and ultimately of the terms, of human exchange that informed the social exercise of authority. Here is where a coded social aesthetic became integral to a utopian logic. The issue of intellectual clarity aside, the aesthetic qualities of female intelligence would make work itself the social exchange it ought to be. Because they communicated so effectively as, and so effectively to, embodied minds, women would bring a new efficacy to the entire range of educated offices and professions.
With this positive evaluation of women’s natural eloquence and powers of persuasion Poullain went far beyond echoing the ideal of honnêteté. He redirected the ideal to engage and change the social world it had been so intent on keeping at a distance. While the discourse of honnêteté challenged distinctly male forms of verbal authority—in the university, in the law court, in the pulpit, and so on—by excluding and ridiculing them, it also implicitly accepted their legitimacy outside its own space. Poullain sought to change those forms; he would humanize them—make them less acts of imposition and more acts of gentle attention and persuasion, as in pleasing conversation—by feminizing them.
Cartesianism for Ladies
In Education Poullain undertook to explain the “new method” for women’s education that he had promised in Equality. His philosophical and psychophysiological arguments for gender equality did not change, but he opted for a new rhetorical strategy. Rather than simply continuing to address the reader directly, he made himself one of four characters engaged in a series of dialogues tuned to the standards of polite conversation. The result was a rather dogmatically Cartesian variation on the Socratic dialogue, ending in entirely predictable agreement.
Having failed to elicit a response with Equality, Poullain hoped the dramatic form of the dialogue would bring him more success. His literary imagination was not up to the task; there is nothing particularly dramatic, much less gripping, about these dialogues.